Martorell, C. & R.P. Freckleton. 2014. Testing the roles of competition, facilitation and stochasticity on community structure in a species-rich assemblage. Journal of Ecology doi:10.1111/1365-2745.12173 At a given location in nature, why are some species present and others absent? Why do some species thrive and have lots of individuals and others are barely eeking out an existence? What determines how many species can live together there?

This is a guest post by Dan McGlinn, a weecology postdoc (@DanMcGlinn on Twitter). It is a Research Summary of: McGlinn, D.J., X. Xiao, and E.P. White. 2013. An empirical evaluation of four variants of a universal species–area relationship.

Communicating research more broadly is not only important for outreach to the public, but with the rapidly expanding literature, we think it’ll also be important for communicating to other scientists.

This is the first of a new category of posts here at Jabberwocky Ecology called Research Summaries. We like the idea of communicating our research more broadly than to the small number of folks who have the time, energy, and interest to read through entire papers. So, for every paper that we publish we will (hopefully) also do a blog post communicating the basic idea in a manner targeted towards a more general audience.